Rocking the Pond: The First Season of the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim

Sports & Outdoors

Chadwin, Dean

Hunting & Fishing

Polestar Pr

Wahine Ball: The Story of Hawai'I's Most Beloved Team

Miscellaneous

Mutual Pub Co

Those Damn Yankees: The Secret Life of America's Greatest Franchise

This paperback edition of Dean Chadwin’s widely-discussed book has been expanded to include the Yankee’s World Series appearance in the 1999 season. The New York Yankees have won twenty-five championships, more than any other American professional sports franchise. The team’s rich history includes a color bar, the towering home runs and bottomless appetites of Babe Ruth, the early and intensely lamented death of Lou Gehrig, frequent labor disputes between players and owners, and the free verse of Yogi Berra and Phil Rizzuto. The 1999 season has emerged as one of the franchise’s most memorable both on and off the field. As the squad raced through an all-time record for victories to win the World Series, observers wondered whether the club’s stadium would return to its wandering ways of a century ago. The Yankees abandoned Baltimore in 1902. After seventy-five years in the Bronx, Yankee management are now pursuing a move to Manhattan or the suburbs that could tap into millions of public dollars. Those Damn Yankees is a riveting and unconventional foray into the murky underworld of baseball, from the incipient sexual desire of young girls visiting the Derek Jeter on-line fansite to the boozy macho heart of the Yankee Nation in the now-endangered bleachers. In compelling asides, Dean Chadwin looks at issues such as baseball’s cult of memory, numerology in sport and society, the emergence of an anti-competitive baseball league of haves and have-nots, and a sporting cartel’s exploitation of inter-city economic warfare.

Baseball

Verso Books

It was the perfect season. In 1998, baseball’s fans thrilled to Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire’s home run slugfest and the Yankees won more games in a season than any team in Major League history. Baseball boomed across the US but the biggest bang was in New York where millions celebrated at a victory motorcade along the Avenue of Heroes. It takes courage, and perhaps a little perversity, to decline an invitation to such a party, but Dean Chadwin was otherwise engaged. In a savvy, discursive look at the Yankees’ 1998 season Chadwin questions whether the foundation of the team’s victory, unmatched television revenues being used to buy the best players, might not spell the end of competition and declining public interest in the national game. Records tumbled, Chadwin contends, less because of unprecedented excellence than as a result of grotesquely unequal competition between the haves and have-nots of the Major League, an imbalance which shows every sign of getting worse. Chadwin’s irreverent journey is taken on rarely traveled byways through the Yankee legend: a century of fan misbehavior, the roots of statistical obsessions, the corrupt ties between the game and the media, and fraught attitudes toward race and sexuality which continue to haunt the franchise today. Readers are seated on the bleachers to hear the Creature’s fifth inning anthem ‘YMCA’, sung to the words ‘Why are you gay?’, and are escorted to the office of the Boss as he shafts Darryl Strawberry, sues his partners, and tells Mayor Rudy Giuliani that, if he is good, he’ll be allowed to donate hundreds of millions of public money toward a new stadium. Those Damn Yankees sounds a warning on the future of baseball as it abandons the spellbinding tension of closely fought games for one sided charades dressed up as tv spectacles. Such a shift will likely sustain the Yankee’s winning streak and will certainly ensure even bigger profits for the top sides’ owners, but it will sadly leave many of the game’s truest fans outside the gate.

Verso

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Books by Chadwin, Dean